April 25, 2012

The consulting work I’m doing now is a wonderful fit for who I am at this moment. In the past two months, I’ve been able to do a lot. They’d like to keep me, and I can see how I could make a good difference here. But I didn’t leave one wonderful job just to start another wonderful job, did I?

My primary reason for experimenting with entrepreneurship is to build something more flexible and more scalable than employment. By flexibility, I mean that it should be able to accommodate the unpredictable schedules and irregular demands of raising young children if W- and I have more kids. By scalability, I don’t mean the mind-boggling aspirations of venture-backed startups. I mean the ability to create more value with less time, and possibly by involving other people.

My secondary reason for experimenting is to learn what I can learn so that I can share those lessons with as many as people as possible. Thanks to frugality and other factors, I enjoy the privilege of being able to learn about entrepreneurship without immediate financial pressure. Thanks to a great network, I can learn from people’s experiences instead of struggling in isolation. Thanks to a keen interest in both technology and business, I can try things out instead of waiting for the missing piece. With all these advantages, maybe I can make things easier for other people.

With these reasons in mind, it becomes easier to say no, even though I also really want to say yes. Full-time work doing what I’m doing now? It would probably be awesome, but it doesn’t follow my reasons, so I’d prefer to help people learn how to do what I do. If I could be in more than one place, I would be in so many. Since I can be in only one place at a time, I’ll focus on training people, and I’ll work on the questions that I most want to ask.